This blog is about my new Civil War history, Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Surprise, surprise, surprise

At the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College last month, I had
the pleasure of speaking for a few moments with Allen C. Guelzo after his talk about the town of Gettysburg itself as a key factor in the battle. A
later post will summarize this talk, but I also followed up on our meeting with
an email question to Guelzo, which he kindly answered. (You can see his answer
to an earlier question – Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? – here.)

The River Queen, site of the 1865 Hampton Roads Peace Conference.

Here is the latest question followed by Guelzo's response and some elaboration by me:

In
researching and writing Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, what were your three
biggest surprises?

Certainly my biggest surprises were as follows:

1. George Meade’s political leanings, as
revealed through his correspondence at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
and especially the Jan. 20, 1865, letter describing his conversations with the
Confederate commissioners – Stephens, Hunter and Campbell – bound for Hampton
Roads.

2. The realization
that Lee had already ordered the concentration of his army before receiving the
report of the spy Harrison.

3. The lack of
evidence that Lee and Stuart ever had the “woodshed” meeting described in The
Killer Angels and many other Gettysburg
books.

Guelzo's first surprise involves the three
commissioners who arranged to meet President Lincoln and Secretary of State
William H. Seward aboard the River Queen at Hampton Roads, Va. They were Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, John A.
Campbell, the assistant secretary of war, and Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of
Virginia. Nothing came of the peace conference.

Meade was a Democrat but denied he was a Copperhead, or
antiwar Democrat. In his book, Guelzo quotes from the Jan. 20, 1865, letter
recounting what Meade told the peace commissioners as they passed through
his lines for the meeting with the president. “I told them very plainly what I thought was the basis on
which the people of the North would be glad to have peace,” Meade wrote. He advised them
that all that was needed was “the emphatic restoration of the Union.”

Guelzo closes his account of what Meade told the commissioners this
way: “As for slavery, dealing with this issue was ‘not insurmountable,’ and as
though he had never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation, Meade ‘thought some
system could be found accommodating both interests, which would not be as
obnoxious as slavery.’ ”

Guelzo’s second and third surprises are related. On June 28,
1863, Henry Thomas Harrison, a spy,

J.E.B. Stuart, Confederate cavalry chieftain.

gave first Gen. James Longstreet and then
Lee a full report on recent movements of the several Union corps marching
toward Pennsylvania. Harrison also informed Lee that Meade had replaced Gen. Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Lee was already concentrating his army before he received
this intelligence, although Harrison’s report prompted him to switch destinations. Instead of moving on Harrisburg to draw the Army of the Potomac
there, it headed for Gettysburg.

Stuart is J.E.B. Stuart, the Confederate cavalry commander who
led his men on a long, useless ride from June 25 to June 28 – a folly, Guelzo
calls it in his book. After the war, Lee worshipers seeking scapegoats for Lee's failure at Gettysburg settled on Stuart (and Longstreet). In his research Guelzo
found no contemporary evidence of the oft-asserted claim that Lee dressed Stuart down for his absence when
he finally reported to him.

From Guelzo’s text, a further conclusion is clear: It is a mistake to think Lee was “blind” at Gettysburg because he was deprived
of the intelligence he expected from Stuart. Henry Thomas Harrison’s report
gave Lee all the up-to-date information he needed about the Union army’s command, makeup, position
and movements.